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Monday, April 13, 2015

The free, online, digitized book collection on FamilySearch.org has been growing rapidly and has now reached over 200,000 volumes. All of these books are completely searchable and in most cases can be downloaded to the registered user's computer. Here is a quote describing the collection from the announcement on the FamilySearch blog in an article entitled, "Free Historic Book Collection Online Hits 200,000th Milestone."

Imagine a free virtual online library of rare historic books from all over the world to help you discover rich, unknown details about the lives of your ancestors. What if the historic book collections held by significant public libraries and venerable societies were the sources of these contributed books? You’d have a dynamic, priceless online repository of some of the greatest hidden historic treasures predominantly unknown to man. International, and a growing host of partnering libraries and organizations and volunteers, have announced today that they’ve reached the milestone of publishing 200,000 historic volumes online for free at books.FamilySearch.org. The growing online collection, which began in 2007, is invaluable to genealogists and family historians in finding their ancestors.

Here is a screenshot of the search page for the Books collection on FamilySearch.org:

2 comments:

James, Have you had any problems being granted access to any of these books? For a while they were available easily, like a couple of years ago. And then as more got digitized and partners started coming in, folks were reporting that they were getting the message about not having permission to view these basic surname books. Hopefully, that has been undone.

Depending on the library and the individual books, there may be restrictions. The restrictions may be that you have to registered to view the book, you may also have to have an LDS account in some instances, you may only be able to view the book on a computer in a Family History Center or only on a computer in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sometimes these restrictions apply to books that contain information about living people.